The present invention is related to a genuineness management method for managing genuine characteristics of an electronic document and a print medium thereof, a genuineness management system, a program, and also a program recording medium.
As methods for correctly managing sources of electronic documents and print media thereof, management methods using digital watermarks have been proposed. Digital watermarking implies such techniques capable of embedding (inserting) specific information into electronic data, e.g., image data and voice data in such a way that this specific information gives no adverse influence to qualities of these electronic data. For instance, names, digital signatures, and the like as to producers and marketing staffs of electronic data are embedded, so that sources of producers and marketing sources can be specified. For example, in the case that image data are employed, there are many possibilities that different information from these image data is embedded by arranging bit streams indicative of luminance of pixels. As an example of digital watermark inserting method, digital watermarks are inserted into featured portions of images. As one of this digital watermarking method, Patent Publication 1 (namely, US2002/0007403 A1) has been proposed.